Elon Musk has a new concept for his high-speed rail concept to send passenger pods through tubes at hundreds of miles per hour. It doesn’t shed much light on one of his company’s plans in D.C. and Maryland to dig tunnels to accommodate said pods and tubes, but hey, there’s video!

In a series of tweets on March 9, Musk — the "architect of tomorrow" or perhaps "messianic huckster," behind Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) and SpaceX — revealed he was “adjusting The Boring Company plan: all tunnels & Hyperloop will prioritize pedestrians & cyclists over cars.”

Of more immediate interest is Musk’s concept tweak and what kind of a departure it is from his idea for a so-called hyperloop system propelling pods, or some kind of electric skate or sled, moving cars through low-pressure tubes.

“Will still transport cars, but only after all personalized mass transit needs are met,” Musk tweeted. “It’s a matter of courtesy & fairness. If someone can’t afford a car, they should go first.”

A piece of land in Hanover, Maryland, just north of Route 175 and in the shadow of government contractor KeyW Corp., is purportedly the spot where a tunnel will be dug, stretching north to within a quarter-mile of the intersection of West Pratt and South Paca streets, near Oriole Park at Camden Yards.

In D.C., meanwhile, little is known about the company’s plans for the site at 53 New York Ave. NE. It could become an underground station in a hyperloop network connecting D.C. to Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York. District officials are just getting an understanding of the project and its potential to move people around the region more efficiently — which is of course why Musk caused a stir last summer when he tweeted that he “received verbal govt approval” to build an underground hyperloop that would reduce the four-hour drive between Washington and New York to 29 minutes.

I did the same a couple of weeks ago and didn't see anything resembling activity. Plans for a superconducting magnetic levitation (maglev for short) train, meanwhile, continue to move through permitting and other issues with about 30 local, state and federal agencies overseeing environmental, transportation, planning and zoning, emergency management and historic preservation policies.

As we detailed in that January cover story, Wayne Rogers, the former energy industry executive and Maryland’s maglev evangelist, needs many more stars to align to see his vision become reality (at a cost of $10 billion to $12 billion). One will be avoiding the fate of the California's 119-mile bullet-train project in the Central Valley, which has seen costs swell by billions due to "intractable problems" related to land acquisition, utility system relocation and safety issues.